Perhaps the use of Denuvo shouldn’t have been announced a few days before release (although what Take-Two did was even more disgusting: Marvel’s Midnight Suns from Firaxis got hit with the call-home DRM at the last minute).
Striking Distance Studios has announced on Twitter what will be added to The Callisto Protocol. We wrote about the season pass content earlier when it was revealed that several death animations would be added to the game later. On February 7, new game+ (you can restart the game with your current gear but on a harder difficulty) and hardcore mode will be added for all players. Season pass holders ($/€30) will get the Out Way skin bundle on February 7, followed by the Contagion bundle in March, the Riot bundle in spring, and then the story DLC in the summer.
The game runs decently on console, but on PC… it’s abysmal, and even on extremely powerful configurations, it stutters and lags. Digital Foundry has summed up the problem for us: ” The Callisto Protocol on PC is unfortunately disastrously poor at launch. There are many issues with this game on PC. Still, the most significant problem is that The Callisto Protocol on PC is an Unreal Engine 4 game that does not pre-compile its shaders. Like nearly every Unreal Engine game I reviewed in recent years, that means The Callisto Protocol on PC has awful shader compilation stutter.
Everything done in the game that is new or shown for the first time induces massive stutters. The game’s opening was almost comical with the frequency and severity of the stutters from the shader compilation. To sum it up, the shader compilation stutter ruins The Callisto Protocol on PC and any attempts the game has to try and build mood or engross you in its story. […] It’s important to point out that lower-end CPUs will have even longer pauses and stutters when they appear. For example, a massive 400 ms stutter on the Core i9 12900k turned into an even more gigantic 750 ms stutter on the Ryzen 5 3600. If you somehow manage to stomach the stutter on PC, you will also be confronted with other problems. The Callisto Protocol barely saturates the CPU in moments when you are CPU Limited in this game, so it is single-thread limited. This is like Gotham Knights, another extremely troubling Unreal Engine 4 release.”
The joke is that there’s also trouble around yesterday’s other big release, Need For Speed Unbound on PC, but we’ll come back to that later today.
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